Manhattan, When I Was Young

by Mary Cantwell

  B. left the doctor’s office a few minutes before me. I was not cool enough to share an elevator with him, or for us to part casually in simultaneously hailed cabs. Dr. Franklin put his hand on my arm and said, “It’s no use, Mary. Let him go.”

  So I did.

  Afterword

  FOR A LONG TIME, I have lived on the street down which I used to walk to the garbage pier to watch the Italians from the South Village grooming their cars. The garbage pier is inaccessible to all but sanitation trucks now, and the old pilings are slumped against the supporting rocks and covered with barnacles and that green slippery stuff of which I have never known the name but which is like aqueous moss. Looking down at them, I might imagine that I am in Bristol. The rocks and the lapping water and the smell of brine are precisely the same. But I do not want to imagine an elsewhere. These, the Hudson River and the towers on the New Jersey shore and the Circle Line boats, are what I want to see.

  At my back is the meat market. During the day large men in bloodstained coats and hardhats load beef carcasses into trucks and take lunch breaks on the loading docks. At night the prostitutes—young men mostly, usually black and sometimes in drag—come out. They stand in the shadows cast by the warehouses’ old metal awnings or, if it’s cold, around the fire somebody has started in a rusted metal drum.

  They are visible, but the other habitués of the meat market are not. They have disappeared behind unmarked doors and down flights of stairs into the leather bars that have made this place ground zero. At least, I think most of the bars have reopened—one sees the occasional notice posted on a streetlight—but they are as transient as the sea gulls that sweep the streets for garbage when the river is frozen. One night you see a cluster of men at a doorway; the next night, maybe not. A certain decorum prevails in the meat market. The men in clusters do not look at me, I do not look at them, and the prostitutes keep custody of their eyes.

  The street itself is nicer than it used to be. The refrigeration plant at its foot has been turned into an apartment house, as have some of the derelict warehouses, and the block association has planted pear and cherry trees and put evergreens in great big terra-cotta pots. Even so, the street is almost always empty when I come home at night, and my eyes are searchlights, sweeping it from side to side until I reach the front door. My key is out, I look behind me, I turn the knob. Whew! I have trumped the predators again.

  My building is one of those that underwent transformation—transfiguration, really. A livery stable built in 1907, it eventually became a warehouse for a meatpacking company. My piece of it, two thirds of the first floor, was its garage. When first I saw it, oil stains had sunk into the cement floor and iron shutters were closed over its tall windows. But two columns stretched sixteen feet to a ribbed tin ceiling, and the space seemed limitless. Two years after I moved in, real estate prices escalated, and I realized that selling it would mean money enough to buy the little house that I had sought all over Greenwich Village. But while I could have crammed my possessions into small rooms, I could no longer have crammed myself. Besides, I had labored for this place as doggedly as Jacob had labored for Rachel.

  The thing is, in New York you are always at someone’s mercy. The children and I had to move from 44 Jane because Matty needed our duplex for his mother-in-law, and after seven years’ residence we had to move from our next place because the landlord wanted it for himself. But we were glad to leave. He beat his wife and she drank herself into slurred speech and ankles that swelled and spilled over her shoes, and sickness soaked their walls and trickled all the way down into ours. But then there was a kind of sickness in our rooms, too. One midnight I had to search the basement, terrified lest my flashlight land on a pair of small, sneakered feet limp and useless on the floor. But that is another story, and one that is not mine to tell.

  We had no place to go, not for the fifteen months it would take to turn the garage into an apartment. Curiously, this was no hardship, for me, at least. Night after night I wrapped cups and saucers and shell frames and a Staffordshire goat and toys long outgrown in sheets of newspaper. I tagged the furniture and put all the sheets and pillows into bureau drawers, and when the truck came to take everything into storage, I was lighter by a million years. Then we started traveling, Rose Red and I (Snow White had gone away), all over Manhattan.

  First came two weeks on the top floor of a narrow house on Jane Street, two doors west of the house to which Mary Rogers—Edgar Allan Poe’s Marie Roget—said she was going on the August day in 1841 when she disappeared. That house, which belonged to her aunt, is gone, but the one that remains is almost certainly its twin, as are the five other twelve-footers on the south side of Jane Street.

  From there we moved to a house as old as the one on Jane Street and a torrid summer on Eighth Avenue. Here we had all four floors, but the living room was so formal we were afraid to sit down, and the kitchen was visited by winged bugs we called Puerto Rican flying cockroaches. We had never seen them before, we have never seen them again, and one day they vanished as suddenly as they had appeared.

  After Eighth Avenue, there was Thirteenth Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues and a few weeks in a basement apartment. All basement apartments are dark, but the landlord had built a staircase from the parlor floor into the garden, which made this one even darker. I cried here all the time, and Rose Red asked timidly, “Is this menopause, Mom? Is this menopause?” “No,” I said, “it’s only the dark,” and cried some more.

  Then we moved into the light: a bedroom, living room, bathroom, and kitchen on a high floor in a high-rise on Hudson Street. I had not lived in a place with a doorman since East Twenty-first Street and had forgotten the silence of apartment-house corridors and the secrecy that attends a long line of closed doors. There was safety in living behind a guarded lobby, but we could hear the toilet flushing in the next-door apartment, and the kitchen was no more than a closet. In New York, unless one is very rich and maybe even then, one is always a Goldilocks, trying rooms on for size and seldom finding a “just right.”

  By now we had run out of sublets, and there was nothing for it but the Chelsea Hotel.

  I had passed the Chelsea, which is on West Twenty-third Street, often over the years and been in it three times. The first time I was at a party given by Virgil Thomson for, he said, “the friends of Alice B. Toklas.” His suite was a monument to horsehair upholstery and stained glass windows, and the guests a monument to intellectually posited frumpiness. I remember a lot of women in late middle age with flyaway hair, crocheted sweaters stretched over breasts that had never known bras, and strings of amber beads.

  The second time was for a dinner given by a couple who were between apartments and making the best of it. They had draped crepe paper around the tiny dining area and across the peeling ceiling, and the hostess had managed to produce a roasted chicken and a lopsided cake out of an oven that never went above 350 degrees. Still, there was no jollity, no celebration. There couldn’t be, not in a room that promised no exit.

  The third time I was interviewing an actress in town for a play. Her suite was presentable—“because the producer coughed up a piano and some pictures”—but on leaving it one walked through scarred corridors to a street where old black men, and a few old white men, held sad travesties of cocktail parties with cheap wine in paper bags and a brave bonhomie.

  I had a horror of the Chelsea, yet here we were, with three cats, a dog, a few clothes (I kept the rest in trash bags in a corner of my office), our portable television set, and my hot rollers, lodged directly above the room in which Sid Vicious had murdered his girlfriend, Nancy, a few days before. “Did you hear anything?” the plainclothes man who knocked on our door asked. “We’re new here,” I answered, and tried to make it clear that we were only passing through.

  We were not. The next day I shared the Chelsea’s one elevator with Thomson, who didn’t seem at all surprised on hearing I had moved in. Maybe he sees me as the kind of woman who sooner or later end
s up in the Chelsea Hotel, I thought. Then I laughed. Obviously, I was the kind of woman who sooner or later ends up in the Chelsea Hotel. For eight months.

  It was a cold winter, but the radiators shuddered with heat, and in the fireplace the Dura-Flame logs from the delicatessen shook with flame. The water was always hot, and dinner simmered on the stove and scented the room. Rose Red had her schoolbooks, and I books borrowed from friends, and together we watched Masterpiece Theatre on the television set. The dog and the three cats nudged us in our sleep, jubilant because they were never more than five feet from their owners, and I felt as if I were pregnant again, not only with Rose Red but with our pets and our few possessions. On the nights that Snow White, slowly returning from sea, stayed over and shared a studio couch with her sister, I would lie awake and listen to their slow, deep breathing. My babies were folded into their mother again, where nothing—short of her death—could harm them.

  Then spring came, and with it opened windows that let in the sound of radios and quarrels across the courtyard and the screech of cats. We moved to the Upper East Side, to a friend’s apartment so meticulously planned that a cigarette ash blindly dropped would hit an ashtray and light bulbs multiplied like mice. Here there was no sound of flushing from the next-door apartment, the maintenance men moved as swiftly and silently as if they were on wheels, and the doorman’s hand was quick to the cab’s rear door. But it was not the Village. We could not find any cheap Asian-Cuban restaurants. Everybody dressed to go to the supermarket.

  We moved again, a few blocks north, to a bigger apartment, big enough for the man who lived there—with his wife, another of my friends—to spare one room for an office. At eight-thirty, just when I was sitting down to the paper and a second cup of coffee, his staff arrived. There could be no lounging about en déshabillé. I was combed, lipsticked, and immaculate by eight.

  Finally, the last move, to an apartment in the South Village, in the district of the old printing plants. Rose Red had fled, for two weeks in Connecticut with a classmate who had proper parents and proper beds, and once again I was hanging around, hanging out. One night I walked past an Italian luncheonette that normally closed at seven. A light was burning in the back, so, curious, I peered through the plate glass to see a scene that might have been taking place in Naples: the luncheonette owner’s family stripping piles of basil of its leaves for next winter’s pesto. The first time I had ever tasted pesto was in Little Italy, only a few blocks away, when B. and I went to the San Gennaro Festival and a band played “I’ll Take Manhattan.” We danced to it, on a raised platform roped off like a boxing ring. “My God,” we kept telling each other, “this is like a movie.”

  At last the new apartment was ready. The furniture was sprung from storage and we settled back into our own beds. “You must be thrilled,” people said. “All that moving around!”

  Rose Red was. I was not. There were still so many streets we had not walked, so many stores we had not entered, so many lives we had not tried.

  Almost nothing has been discarded, not even the photographs and drawings and mottoes kept on my bulletin board at Mademoiselle. I took them with me when I left, all that I retain of that job besides the way my lips, without my willing it, curve into a smile whenever I remember the chatter and the I Ching and “Group order! Group order!” I missed them when I moved on to the New York Times. But not much. They had been outgrown.

  Where I am now is a very grownup place, and writing editorials is a very grownup occupation. But to me it seems that I have come full circle, that I am copywriting all over again. Describing a dress and describing a social policy take the same set of knacks: the ability to analyze, clarify, and compress. One has to have a point of view, of course, and I am no more skilled in debate now than I was when I tried to tell B. and Jerry about transsubstantiation and Duns Scotus. But once I am seated in front of my computer, everything comes clear. If I have spent a lifetime writing one thing or another, it is because it is the only way I can figure out what I am thinking.

  Sometimes I am invited to a publisher’s lunch, and then I sit at a long mahogany table staring at the distinguished guest and his (or, occasionally, her) inevitable aides, worrying about forking the baked chicken breast off the platter presented at my left shoulder and wondering if I should put the spoon for my iced tea (the recipe for which is said to have come from the famous Iphigene) on the damask tablecloth or the little plate the glass stands on. The silver is Tiffany’s Hampton, the conversation is equally polished, and the guest, seated at the right hand of the publisher and an old pro at forking chicken off platters, exhales success.

  When I leave, after the cigars have been passed, the demitasse sipped, and the guest’s hand shaken, it is with the momentary illusion that all’s well with the world, or could be. Haven’t I just been at civilization’s epicenter? Haven’t I just sipped a perhaps historic iced tea?

  Little now can be experienced on its own, not even in Times Square. There is always a point of reference. Walking along Broadway at lunchtime, I am reminded of Allie and me, also at lunchtime, searching for an I. Miller outlet we had heard was in the area. Our college shoes—Bass Weejuns, sneakers, and suede pumps for fraternity parties—were not suitable for the office.

  After dark, heading for the subway at Forty-second Street, I try to figure out where Toffenetti’s Restaurant was. This corner? That corner? Back there? B. and I never ate at Toffenetti’s, but we thrilled to the menu posted in its window, not for its offerings but for the purpleness of its prose. When B. sent a sample to The New Yorker (everyone we knew was forever looking for funny bits of prose to send to The New Yorker) and it was published, we were as excited as if he had produced a short story.

  Strolling down Fifth Avenue after a movie at MoMA, I remember, we would pass the Olivetti typewriter on a stanchion outside the nearby Olivetti showroom. But how nearby? There was a paper in it for passersby, and on it B. would type “the quick brown fox . . .” and I, “My name is Mary and I live on. . . . ”

  I called Olivetti a few years ago. I wanted to know exactly where that showroom was. Nobody there knew, or had even heard of it. But that typewriter existed, I’m sure of it, as surely as we did once.

  There is no bulletin board in my Times office, only Piranesi prints left by my predecessor. My sole addition to the décor is a big color photograph Kate took of Bristol Harbor. But buried under a pile of leaflets on a shelf in back of my desk is a photograph torn from a magazine. It is that famous one of the little Jewish boy who, with his hands up, is being led away to what one supposes was his death. I love that boy in the photograph, because had he lived to adulthood, he would have looked like B. In fact, he is B., more surely than the stranger I danced with a few years ago at Margaret’s wedding.

  At the bottom of the in box on my desk is another photograph—a Xerox, actually, of a photograph—from the May 7, 1961, issue of the Sunday Times Magazine. It accompanied an article about Greenwich Village, and is of me and Kate.

  I did not know a camera had been aimed at us until I read the article on a Saturday night at 21 Perry Street. I turned to the runover and there it was, a picture of a thin, square-shouldered woman in a Lacoste shirt, white pants, and sneakers pushing a stroller, the kind with a fringed canopy. The child in the stroller is obviously a girl; you can tell by her bonnet.

  We have been at Washington Square, I am sure, and now we are going home for supper. Along the way I have been looking, as always, for the little house to which we will move one day, the house that is the material equivalent of Jane Austen’s prose. And here it is, in the newspaper of record, a record of one New York woman’s stroll with her daughter on a hot spring day in 1961.

  I still stroll, all the time, but I doubt I shall ever move again. I will never find a better place. Besides, maybe I do not want to open any more doors. But that is silly. They will open anyway. Still, sometimes I imagine living where Margaret lives: a pretty little backwater in Brooklyn where every stray cat gets a bowl of Fri
skies put out for his breakfast and householders sweep their sidewalks every morning. I go there often, for dinner, and breathe deeply of the peace.

  The dream lasts only for as long as it takes my cab to cross the Manhattan Bridge, travel west on Chambers Street, and round the corner onto what remains of the West Side Highway. What I see then, at the right, is a line of massive buildings, and what I feel is their power. It is as if I have been given a shot with a kick like a donkey’s, a shot of something to which I am terminally addicted.

  “Could you wait till I get inside?” I ask the driver. He nods, and stays in place until I unlock the front door of my building. A short flight of steps, and I unlock the door to my apartment. The cats are waiting as I enter; the barely audible pad of their paws is the only sound.

  An hour or two with a book, and it is time for sleep. I open the bedroom window, not on a street but on a garden. The noise from traffic, pedestrians, quarrels, late-night drunks cannot penetrate the trees and bushes and these thick brick walls. Even so, I can hear it. The hive. Buzzing.

  Mary Cantwell is a member of the editorial board of the New York Times. She has been a writer and editor at Mademoiselle and Vogue and is the author of American Girl. She lives in Greenwich Village.